China, Dzungars, and Uyghurs
Long-time readers of this blog know I’m quite interested in the history of Central Asia. This region of the world is “back in the news.” The Uyghurs of the Tarim […]
The Hui Descend From Mongol Era Central Asians
Over the years I have written and talked about the Hui people of China a fair amount. Who are the Hui? In short, they are a group of Muslims who […]
You will be assimilated: the dragon is hungry
In WSJ, Beijing Accelerates Campaign of Ethnic Assimilation: China has taken an aggressive approach to melding the nation’s many groups into a national identity. Because the audience is American the […]
Dragon babies
Zoom Executive Accused of Disrupting Calls at China’s Behest – U.S. prosecutors have charged a company executive based in China with conspiring to terminate online meetings about the Tiananmen Square […]
The years of the dragon
Reading Noah Smith’s Invincible empire? I thought back to David Wingrove’s future history where China reigns supreme, Chung Kuo. In the 1990’s it felt like this was very speculative science […]
Week 4-7, Gene Expression book club, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom
Catching up on Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom (I have to get to chapter 11 in the next few days). To say that this is a hard book to follow […]
China, strong government, free society, India, weak government, strong society
In our discussion on the podcast, Abhinav talked about China and India in relation to society vs. government. I stumbled on this chart from Pew that illustrates it. China’s government controls religion much more than India’s government. But on a personal level, the Chinese have much more freedom in their religious identity. Indians are simply …
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The Elephant at the Dragon
This comment reflects in many ways important elements about how and why the Chinese view the Indians as they do: … your question has answers in two periods. The second and most recent was during the cold war, shaped by Chinese elite (diplomatic) interaction with their Indian counterparts during this period who came to see …
The dragon’s spots don’t change
The New York Times has published a piece on what is happening in China, ‘Absolutely No Mercy’: Leaked Files Expose How China Organized Mass Detentions of Muslims, based on a leak of 400 pages (I assume you should be able to read the article if you click the link even without a subscription). As to […]
Enter the dragon
On the first episode of a new podcast, The Realignment, the hosts interview J. D. Vance. It was an interesting conversation, during the course of which Vance expressed a great deal of alarmism about the rise of China as a world power. He indicated that hear feared China is intent on world domination. Vance’s […]
Corporations without borders in a world with borders
So there has been some stuff in the media about the international element of American corporations. In particular, Billionaire Peter Thiel to Google CEO Sundar Pichai: 3 questions on China that need answers. Thiel has been throwing broadsides at Google due to his participation in a conference on nationalism. During the period of Chimerica, as […]
Corporations without borders in a world with borders
So there has been some stuff in the media about the international element of American corporations. In particular, Billionaire Peter Thiel to Google CEO Sundar Pichai: 3 questions on China that need answers. Thiel has been throwing broadsides at Google due to his participation in a conference on nationalism. During the period of Chimerica, as […]
Uyghur genetics and Kenneth Kidd – going beneath the surface
The latest episode of NPR’s “Planet Money” was interesting to me and touched upon issues I’ve been thinking on a lot. Stuck In China’s Panopticon has a genetic angle. The Chinese government seems to be identifying and tracking Uyghurs with genetics. Or at least has the capability to do so. That is, in part, thanks […]
Since 1989
China is an authoritarian, in some ways totalitarian, nation-state. But we need to keep the larger perspective in mind as well.
Judge a society by how the odds are for the least of them.
China’s demographic disaster impacts Pakistan
The AP has a long and sad story out, Pakistani Christian girls trafficked to China as brides. One must be careful of sensational stories that hit a lot of our emotional buttons, but it seems deeply reported, and names names. Because of the surplus of men in China, there has been a recent tendency of …
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The emergence of Han identity as autochthonous
Reader Matt points me to two new papers on the linguistic phylogenetics of the Sino-Tibetan language families, Dated language phylogenies shed light on the ancestry of Sino-Tibetan and Phylogenetic evidence for Sino-Tibetan origin in northern China in the Late Neolithic. You should read Matt’s whole comment, but one thing he mentions is that by ~3,000 […]
The end of America as the world as we know it
Today in Variety, ‘Alita: Battle Angel’ No Match for China’s ‘Wandering Earth’ Overseas: The Chinese New Year is bringing in huge business in the Middle Kingdom. China’s sci-fi epic “The Wandering Earth” pulled in a massive $96.6 million from three ter…
The end of America as the world as we know it
Today in Variety, ‘Alita: Battle Angel’ No Match for China’s ‘Wandering Earth’ Overseas: The Chinese New Year is bringing in huge business in the Middle Kingdom. China’s sci-fi epic “The Wandering Earth” pulled in a massive $96.6 million from three ter…
China is what you get if your civilization never gets amnesia
The author of Early China: A Social and Cultural History occasionally engages in asides which analogize his own domain of study to other societies and histories. In the process, he illustrates how China is in some ways nonpareil. When discussing the emergence of philosophical thinking during the Spring and Autumn Period there is a connection made to […]
Do the northern Chinese have Scythian ancestors?
There was some question regarding possible Scythian admixture into the early Zhou below. This is possible because of the Zhou dynasty, arguably the foundational one of Chinese imperial culture (the Shang would have been alien to Han dynasty Chinese, but the Zhou far less so), may have had interactions with Indo-European peoples to their north […]